Scorsese's going to want to sit down for this...

Pictured: what blissful
disengagement feels like.

I mentioned a few days ago that I was rapidly spiraling into the cranky curmudgeon phase of my life, and quite a bit earlier than one would expect. Who can blame me though? Everything, and I mean everything, is terrible. The ice caps are melting, people have to GoFundMe for life-saving medications and crime is now straight up legal if you happen to be the President. Anyone not drowning on their own cynicism about the future is living in some kind of delusional fantasy world which...which actually sounds pretty great...

Ok, I exaggerate, not everything is terrible. I mean, uh...I can't think of any examples right now, but at least there's plenty to watch. Sure, we're sliding towards a Wall-E-esque dystopia, but did you see the last season of Bojack Horseman?

Pictured: the grim future in which we sit around slurping smoothies and
consuming content. But holy shit, that robot was cute though, right?

The only escape here would
be when it's over. Amiright?

I mention all this because I want to explain my reaction to the announcement by a Russian filmmaker that he will be shooting the first vertical movie. What the hell is a vertical movie? you may ask. Well, you know how people take videos with their phones without holding them sideways? It's like that. A entire movie like that. Skinny vision. Some people say it's the format of the future. Others, like me, say that skinny vision is for people who don't know how to take video with their phone. Like Timor Bekmambetov. He's the aforementioned director shooting a WWII epic called V2. Escape from Hell. It's touted as the "first vertical film" which. Ugh. Look, I warned you that I'm fueled almost entirely by premature old-man rage, so take my disgust in that context but we can not, repeat can not let this become a thing. Portrait orientation is fine if you're video chatting or whatever. People generally taller than they are wide. But it's terrible for any other kind of video because human vision is wide screen. It's like when your sister in law sends you video of your nieces and nephews doing adorable things and-yeah, you heard me Heather. I'm talking to you.

"I'm woke! I get the youths! Twitterbooks,
MySpace...here, I shall floss for you!"

-Bekmambetov

Bekmambetov, aged 61, has already made a career for himself with films trading on internet culture the most famous of which is the Unfriended series for which he invented (if you can be the fifth person to do something) a new genre he calls screen life. The idea is that the film unfolds on a single screen like on a computer or smartphone and footage should only replicate what actual smartphones. It sounds sort of like an outgrowth of the found footage genre like Blair Witch or Cloverfield but you know, but for kids who play Fortnite and know what Tik-Tok is.

Anyway, I get that experimentation is the only way to move something forward and I also admit that I'm ragging on something I have no experience with apart from a deeply held conviction that movies should be landscape format as God intended. I don't know if I'm ready for a world of skinny vision movies and TV series about people screwing around on Facebook. I guess I might as well just buy a cardigan, fill the pockets with butterscotches and settle in for forty or fifty years of NCIS reruns.

You...you tell him. I don't want to tell him...